The MashedIn team continued with an upfront design process this week. The feature coming down the pike is a new widget format focussed on recommendations. One rationale for this new widget format is that recommendations require a larger format in order to present them effectively. In this new widget the core technology of mutual connection discover will still be utilized, as you can see in the prototype. Once our user stories and acceptance criteria were in order I quickly threw together a wireframe based upon them. We projected this up on the whiteboard during a demo and as a team marked it up with UI improvements and ensured everything still met the acceptance criteria and user stories set forth by the product owner. This, by the way, is a great technique for rapidly iterating over a design and documenting any improvements. (apologies for the photo quality)
Once we were satisified as a team with this initial design it was time to create the prototype and test it. If more changes were needed to the design we could easily iterate over the prototype and re-test prior to implementation.
Recommendation Widget Prototype
The tasks in the user test were based upon the original user stories. All the tasks were completed successfully by the users tested. So after some very minor tweaking to design this is what’s currently being implemented by the MashedIn team. Looking forward to its release….
